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This blog hasn’t received any significative update for about six months, since when Gamesome 2.0 beta was announced and released to the public.

In these days, Gamesome will become stable enough to be publicly released for everyone. There’s just some final polishing to do, but no open issues.

Gamesome 2.0 has been rewritten from scratch and is also a major update.

The new features are not so new to those brave people who decided to join the beta testing,

but if you haven’t tried the new app yet…

What should you expect from this new version?

Completely new user interface

The new user interface takes advantage of Android’s Material Design standards, uses several cutting-edge libraries and it’s a huge improvement since Gamesome v1, in this image you can see how the platform selection screen looks like:

Even the Game menu has been redesigned, and it’s probably my favourite part:

There are many additional features: you can finally browse all of your games in a single page or by genre, mark games as finished, manually search their metadata and much more!

Customizable Platforms and Emulators

That’s it, you will be able to add and/or edit your own platforms and emulators, in such a way that there’s no need for an update of Gamesome to fix your issues.

Do you want to add a new file extension support for your platform? It’s as easy as editing a text file!

Do you want to create a new platform that isn’t currently available on Gamesome? It’s as easy as adding a text file!

Do you want to add a new emulator for your platforms? Well, it’s a bit more tricky, but you have to add a text file in this case too! 🙂

Further documentation on how to add custom platforms and emulators can be found here.

Selectable Scrapers and Identifiers

For each platform, you will now be able to choose your preferred source for game metadata among the supported ones:

TheGamesDB.net (online service)

IGDB.com (online service)

OpenVGDB (offline service, only uses connection to download covers)

ArcadeHits.net (online service)

If you choose to use OpenVGDB, you’ll be able to take advantage of an Identifier. Identifiers try to calculate a “fingerprint” of your rom files in order to identify your games with higher accuracy.

Currently, Gamesome has four identifiers:

Basic Identifier: for most of the retro consoles, except MAME/NeoGeo/CD Based Systems.

MAME Identifier: for arcade platforms (MAME/NeoGeo)

PSP Identifier: for PSP games

PSX Identifier: for PS1 Games

What will come next?

Automatic profile updates: A new webservice is under development, it will automatically take care of automatically updating your platform and emulator profiles.

Better documentation: I will write a complete guide of how Gamesome works, and I’ll do it by populating the new GitHub-hosted wiki.

Plug-in architecture and development of 3rd party scrapers/identifiers: That’s it. If you don’t like how bundled scrapers work, I’ll provide the code to create your own!